


Hard to Kill

by Kierkegarden



Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Ambiguous/Open Ending, Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Character Study, Dead Dove: Do Not Eat, Explicit depictions of drug use, Gen, Heroin, Language, M/M, Mentions of dubious consent, Overdosing, Suicidal Thoughts, Whump, prostitution mentions
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-24
Updated: 2019-11-24
Packaged: 2021-02-26 00:07:55
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,585
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21544267
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kierkegarden/pseuds/Kierkegarden
Summary: Klaus should have collapsed long ago. Nobody is meant to keep running and running forever. He wants to voice that to the paramedics somehow, but he can’t stop wheezing. They slip the oxygen mask over his nose and mouth and Klaus breathes again. Not because he wants to, but because it's habit. It’s always habit. He’s had a lot of practice using these lungs, he’s just never been good at it.(or 5 times Klaus doesn't quit + the 1 time he does)
Relationships: Ben Hargreeves & Klaus Hargreeves, Dave/Klaus Hargreeves, Diego Hargreeves & Klaus Hargreeves
Comments: 23
Kudos: 233
Collections: Numerous OTPS Infinite Fandoms





	Hard to Kill

**Author's Note:**

> Hard to Kill, having no relation to the movie of the same title. I've heard it's horrible.
> 
> Special thanks to my husband, an outsourced drug tester who had to answer some pretty uncomfortable questions about work; and special thanks to the people who had to put up with me while I was using, and still chose to help me.

“Drug misuse is not a disease, it is a decision, like the decision to step out in front of a moving car.” -- Philip K. Dick

_For M_

I.

Klaus sees in pointillism. He’s nestled in a bed of glass shards, and a warm red blanket is oozing through the cracks. His cocaine addled brain is doing somersaults now, fighting the part of him that just wants to go to sleep. He just wants to go to sleep but the street is so hard underneath him and the flashing red lights are giving him a migraine. 

“Turn off the lights,” he says. It comes out more of a half-intelligible groan which makes him giggle. The giggle sounds more like a scream, which suddenly makes him aware that he’s in the worst pain he has ever felt in his life. The blanket, he realizes, is his own blood.

Is he dying? Klaus is no stranger to Death, is used to watching it laugh at him through a two way mirror. He always imagined the other side to be colder and darker, but it’s so bright here in the middle of the street that he can see the flashing lights through his shut eyelids. 

When he opens his eyes again, he rolls them around to see that the street is wet, maybe with his blood, maybe with the rain that has started to pour down on them since he last looked. It’s annoying, he thinks, and then he sees Diego’s car, completely totalled, with the windshield smashed up against a telephone pole and he laugh-screams again. It looks like one of those ice-cream pops in the shape of a beloved character, left out in the sun too long and melted grotesquely. Had his dad ever signed the contract for the Umbrella Academy pops? Klaus can’t remember.

If he’s not dead, then he will be soon. Diego loved that piece-of-shit car. 

The thing about cocaine is that it goes from fun to annoying as soon as you want to get some fucking sleep. He feels himself being lifted -- oh _God_ , does that hurt -- and the ambulance noises get louder, the lights unbearably bright. He is placed on a cot and leans back, face pushed right against the window like he’s a little kid again, waiting for Griddy’s to open at the crack of dawn, with his siblings in tow. 

The wail of the ambulance drones on and on as they speed down the highway. People are talking in hushed voices, prodding Klaus’s body, but he barely notices them. The wet streets are so pretty, he thinks, reflecting the lights of the city. He would have laid there forever.

“ _No_ ,” Klaus says, “Nononono.”

The first thing he hears is the beeping of the heart monitor, then the hushed voices of Diego and what he can only assumes is a doctor. The room is bright white, Klaus can feel its sterility even though he hasn’t yet opened his eyes. He can smell the latex gloves and the fake citrus cleaner. He can feel the crisp paper lining and the starchy wet-warm blanket draped over him. 

“...positive for cocaine,” he hears the unfamiliar female voice say, “Your brother is lucky to be alive.”

“ _Idiot,”_ Diego says, and sniffs. 

Klaus drifts back off again with a groan.

A dreamy smile spreads across Klaus’s lips and he blinks his eyes, taking in the yellow morning sun, how it dances on the blue patterned curtains. A room with a window means more than a temporary stay. It means more than an overdose.

“Good morning,” Ben’s voice startles him and he whips his head around to see his dead brother sitting cross-legged in the visitor’s chair. God, it hurts to move his neck. There’s some kind of metal brace that prevents its full range of motion. His arm is in a cast. The underside of his leg, where it hinges at the knee, is _killing_ him. 

“Oh, _hey_ Ben,” Klaus flutters his eyelashes, “Long time no sober. No see.” He corrects himself quickly with a snort. There’s something wrong with his nose too, he feels the crustiness break as he wiggles it back and forth. 

Ben rolls his eyes. “You crashed Diego’s car.”

“Don’t be silly, brother dear, I don’t know how to drive.”

They should have let me _die,_ Klaus thinks. This comedown is more than just a bummer, it is fucking killing him. He wretches and his entire body shudders. Eyes flickering around the room, he searches for something to take his mind off of it.

Klaus has got an IV but nothing good is coming through it. He recognizes the salty burn and crustiness under his nose as saline. There’s a bottle of rubbing alcohol on the counter. There’s the shiny red call-a-nurse button. With great strain, Klaus knocks it over and over again with his palm.

A minute passes before he hears footsteps and voices in the hallway, particularly Diego’s voice, and remembers once again: Diego’s going to kill me. 

“Mm,” Klaus manages. With a tremendous effort, he lifts his “ _Hello”_ hand. It also happens to be his cast arm, and an entirely new kind of pain rushes over him. 

“Klaus?” The nurse is a woman in her 40s, with greying blond hair and a soft chin. Her name-tag says Angela, “You’ve been through quite the tumble.”

Klaus gazes right over her towards where Diego is standing, face unreadable. Slowly, he drops his hand, and it falls, heavy and limp against the blanket. The pain throughout his body pulses to the persistent beep.  
His eyes flick back to Angela who is readying a finger gauge. As if reading his mind, she unplugs the heart monitor and the noises whine to a halt.

“Now that you’re up, we don’t need this thing. Let’s just record your vitals and I’ll be out of your hair. Your brother has been waiting to visit with you all night. I don’t think he slept a wink.” She looks back at Diego, whose eyes drop, and begins a steady string of procedures Klaus is all-too-familiar with. Finger gauge. Blood pressure cuff. Breathe in -- (oh _God,_ does that hurt) -- breathe out. The cold nub of a thermometer drags across his forehead.

“Now,” Angela says, when Klaus has been sufficiently poked and prodded, “Was there anything else you needed?”

“Something for the pain?” Klaus says hopefully.

Angela narrows her eyes. “I’ll have to talk to the doctor.”

“You always wanted a cast,” Diego says, “Remember when Allison fell down the stairs during that training course? You were so jealous.”

Klaus realizes, with a sudden wave of inexplicable irritation, that Diego is not mad at him. Maybe, he thinks, maybe he doesn’t realize that it was his car I totaled. Maybe he thinks it was somebody else’s. Maybe he’s loopy from being sleep deprived. The nurse had said he’d been up all night.

“It was all anyone talked about for weeks,” Klaus manages, “Sign Allison’s cast this, get well soon that! Like, we get it, she’s injured, okay? Plus, the neon pink was so _hot_. Dad would have never let me get away with that.”

Diego reaches into his pocket and, with a sheepish smile, pulls out a sharpie.

“May I?” 

“I’d be honored.”

Klaus watches as Diego swivels the marker to form his patented signature, the cursive O swirling underneath to form a knife-life tail. He realizes, with a foggy fondness, that his cast is the same shade of neon pink that he had so coveted as a child. 

“You’re not mad about…?” Klaus starts.

“About the car?” Diego exhales, shaking his head, “I’m not mad, I’m furious. You’re done living with me forever. When you heal up, I’m going to kick your ass and make you wish you were dead. But for now, I’m just so glad you’re not.”

That makes one of us, Klaus thinks. He stares out the window, where a tree branch houses a happy family of birds. He can’t remember where he learned that birds drop their babies out of the nest to teach them how to fly -- probably some television show or book that Mom had them read to give them a foundation in science. It seems silly now, as scientific anomalies, that they would have to learn that shit. Those laws didn’t apply to them anyway.

“Oh God,” Klaus groans with a sudden realization, “Am I going to have to go to court?”

“What?”

“Driving without a license, driving under the influence, buying fake pee for the inevitable drug tests. All that jazz.”

“ _That’s_ what you’re concerned about? You almost died and you’re worried about having to piss clean?” Diego’s voice rises an octave, “I swear to God, Klaus, if you weren’t in a hospital bed right now, I would actually punch your lights out. This is the sort of situation where normal people find Jesus. You’re already thinking about finding your next fix.”

Klaus bites back his response as Diego suddenly rises. He storms out of the room, muttering something under his breath about pride and shame and other big vague things that Klaus has never much cared about. He can feel Ben looking at him, the soft inescapable disapproval.

“Shut up,” Klaus says, although Ben hasn’t said anything for hours.

Angela returns in a few minutes. Her hands are full of something clear and small and exciting. Klaus leans as far as he can in his bed, perking up at the sight of it.

“Okay, Klaus, here’s the situation,” she smacks the blue lid of the vial again the counter twice, “Doctor Collins says we can give you fifty miligrams under supervision. Because cocaine has a short lifespan in the body, you should be able to avoid a negative interaction.”

Angela attaches the vile to his IV. Klaus curls his toes. Ben averts his eyes.

“I need you to promise me that I won't regret this. I fought to get this for you because a patient in your shoes should be entitled to some relief.”

Entitled to some relief. Klaus bookmarks that one for later excuses and gives her one last incredibly painful salute, as the dizzy blur of an opiate high washes over him. It leaves the clean white room looking as beautiful as the slick neon streets.

II.

“You can tell ‘em,” Klaus slurs, slamming his papers on the counter with a shit-eating grin, “That I’ve been totally sober my entire life. From the womb to the tomb.”

The two employees exchange a look. One of them, a man who looks ironically like he should be a bouncer, ushers him back.

“Totally sober,” Klaus continues as he walks down the hall, still limping on his bad knee, “Sotally tober.”

The court outsources drug testing. Thankfully, they let him wait until he was done with physical therapy to begin, not that he’s been showing up to those appointments either. It’s been months since the crash, and Klaus has mostly been staying with strangers, his young body enough to pay for shelter and drugs. Everything has been surprisingly alright, one long fuzzy stream of highs.

The court papers were very explicit that if he didn’t show up, he would go to prison. The joys, Klaus thinks, of adulthood. He doesn’t remember what they said would happen if he didn’t pee clean. 

It becomes clear that he can’t use the small squirt bottle of dog piss he has taped to his leg, when the drug tester asks him to drop his pants to his knees. Klaus looks over his shoulder and slowly untapes the device, not breaking eye-contact, as his leather cut-offs shimmy all the way to the floor.

“It’s funny,” he says, “You wouldn’t believe the last time a big, bearded man like you asked me to drop my pants to my knees. It’s like, whoa, I’m having some pretty unbelievable memories right now. Do you --” he holds the jerry-rigged bottle out like an offering “-- have a trashcan in here? I don’t know how this got there but I could feel it pushing against my junk all morning.”

The drug tester sighs. “This isn’t Applebee’s. I can get you thrown out for sexual harassment and your test will automatically pop as a negative. Do you want to give it a go or not?”

“Speaking of Applebee’s,” Klaus bats his eyelashes, “Do you want to catch me later for a drink? I’ve heard they’re having a dollar special for cran-vodkas and I’ve got exactly three dollars.”

He leans in close to read the poor guy’s name tag. 

“ _Dereck_ , that’s a sexy name,” Klaus spins around so his bare ass is against the counter, propped up by his elbows. It’s entirely too casual of a pose for a man wearing only a half-unbuttoned Hawaiian shirt.

Laughing in disbelief, Dereck takes the device from him. “I am legally obligated to report that to your Public Defender. As for your test, I think we can both agree you failed.”

Klaus bends to pull up his shorts and underwear, and unceremoniously zips himself up. He imagines Dereck going home to his family. “I tested a real basket case today,” he’d tell his wife. What kind of sick fuck gets a job watching people pee, anyway?

Dereck walks him out into the lobby, where some ancient motivational poster preaches that failure is the first step to success. Klaus is just about to make one last remark, when the door swings open, bell chiming, and Klaus gasps. Standing there in all his Kentucky fried glory, is his father. And he looks positively livid.

“Number Four.” It’s less of a greeting and more of an acknowledgement, as he passes Klaus entirely, making a bee-line for the desk. He marches right up to the window and slams down the manilla folder in his hands. From where he’s standing, Klaus can see it has some kind of red stamp across the front, and Dereck is eyeing it like its contents include the winning lottery numbers for the next five years.

“The Public Defender has cleared my son’s name. He will be coming with me now,” Klaus’s father says.

Dereck opens his mouth and closes it. “Reginald Hargreeves,” he manages to get out, “The _Seance?”_

Klaus bites his lip. So he won't be going to jail. His dear old father has other arrangements. He grabs Klaus by the wrist and half-drags him out the door, where his driver is pulled up waiting. Klaus vaguely notes the flashing of cameras as he gets in. He reaches instinctively into his sock where he’s got a joint stashed as his father gets in passenger. His mind goes blank with dread.

It’s quiet as a morgue in the car, which is its own kind of private loudness. The Dead are clawing gnarled fingers across the shiny leather interior, wailing like a siren. Klaus puts the joint to his lips, because fuck it, what has he got to lose, and digs around in his pocket for a lighter. Before he can find one, his father has knocked the joint out of his mouth with one clean, sharp, surprisingly strong punch.

“Number Four.”

The contents of the joint is littered across the seat. It was never packed tight enough anyway, he doesn’t have his full range of fine motor skills back yet from the crash. 

“What have I said about putting filth into your body?”

Klaus looks down.

“I’d imagine that twenty-four hours in the mausoleum should rid you of this disgusting habit.”

Twenty-four hours in the crypt, Klaus thinks, will just short of kill him.

“I’m an adult,” says Klaus, “You can’t make me go --”

“Number Four,” his father barks, cutting him off, “You will speak again when I have Pogo write up a report.”

Klaus falls silent. He’s already thinking of what he’ll do when he emerges, because bargaining with himself is easier than bargaining with his father. In a sick way, he thinks, it’s better than prison. A day in the mausoleum feels like an eternity, but in twenty-four hours, he thinks, he can load up his body with enough shit to forget about each and every one of them.

III.

  
  


Klaus’s body is shaking when he sees the daylight. He can vaguely register Pogo’s eyes staring down at him from the wall of other eyes, mouths, voices all screaming over one another in an irreconcilable cacophony. 

“Welcome home, my boy,” says Pogo. 

Klaus’s leg spasms. He heaves a breath.

On the city bus, his thumb bounces nervously between numbers on his phone’s contact list, before finally shoving it into his pants and pulling out the sterling silver candy dish he had stashed around his balls. The woman across the aisle from him stands up and moves three aisles back. 

God, Klaus feels disgusting. He needs a shower, he needs some fucking sleep, but mostly…

He gets off at city center, pawns the candy dish for ten bucks, and flips his phone open again at the bus stop. It’s like a daisy, he thinks, flipping between his dealer and Diego’s phone numbers. He loves me. He loves me not. 

Klaus was never one for the mushy stuff.

“The deal only stands if you shoot it.”

Teko is in his fifties, dresses like an old time mobster, and owns a prominent nightclub downtown. He has a nice apartment and keeps it clean. Klaus has already used his shower and has his scent on his skin and hair -- a smooth masculine musk. Expensive. Composed. If he wasn’t so tired, Klaus thinks, he’d offer him more than the money, but he doesn’t want to ruin his chances. A tenner, these days, doesn’t go far.

Klaus rolls his eyes, adjusting the towel around his waist. 

“What does it _matter?_ Besides, a client only pays you if he's alive.”

Klaus has never used needles. He’s spent weeks coked out of his mind. He’s candy-flipped acid and molly. He’s smoked through three bowls by mid afternoon and still had the energy to hit the bars, only to wake up choking on his own vomit -- but he’s never used needles. Somehow, there’s always been a line. 

“Bluntly,” Teko says, “You’ll be shooting next weekend anyway. And you’ll _like_ it.”

Klaus trembles, as Teko dangles the small sack of powder in front of his eyes. It looks so _good_ there, clean as the fresh fallen snow. 

“It’s p-pure?” 

“Mmm,” Teko snatches it back and Klaus visibly winces, “I’ll make that the best ten you’ve ever spent. Satisfaction guaranteed.” 

Carrot, Klaus thinks, meet stick.

Teko shows him how to dissolve it and how to tie himself a tourniquet. When Klaus asks him if he can spend the night, he just laughs.

“Why not? But it’s the last time you use in my apartment. I’m not running a shooting gallery here. I like you Klaus, you’re cute, okay? But I don’t like you that much.”

Teko shows him how to angle the needle and find a good vein. Virgin veins, he calls them. This is the last untouched, unused part of Klaus and he is giving it up. He’s lying on Teko’s couch and the TV is playing something softly, but Klaus can’t stop looking out the open window, the cityscape silhouetted against the setting sun.

“I feel like a blushing bride on my wedding night,” says Klaus, half joking, half serious, and mostly just to hear himself talk, “Maybe we should close the blinds?”

Not that it would matter, he thinks, because there is no such thing as privacy.

Teko shows him how to relax and inject the drug so slow that it washes down over him like a soft, warm ocean. There’s nothing scary about shooting up, Klaus realizes, he doesn’t even feel _high._ There’s no rush, just the pleasant babbling on the television, and the comfort of the blanket against his back against the cushions, and the sunset. Its gold and pink clouds dapple together and God, how did Klaus never realize how beautiful it was?

Had he always been too distracted by the Dead to notice that _this_ was what life was meant to be?

“Alright, my blushing bride,” Teko pats him on the back, “I’m gonna be in my room. Holler if you need anything.”

I need to remember to thank him, Klaus thinks, because this is the greatest feeling in the entire world. 

I need to never forget how this feels right now, Klaus thinks.

IV.

Klaus sees in the fog and brine of impressionism and nothing feels real. Nothing feels good. The Dead have been hounding him like wolves for seven days, seven days he’s spent locked up in this shit house, howling for attention as his addiction howls one key higher, for the only thing that makes his life worth living.

He’s made plans A through F so far, on how to get high when he gets out of here and recounts them religiously in his head during group therapy. Fact: that is the only thing keeping him alive.

He refuses his methadone. Fact: that will kill him.

It’s a race between these two facts, and the finish line is tomorrow. 

Klaus has never felt sicker. His stomach is in a constant state of ejection from both ends, perpetually sweating and writhing and screaming out. He’s never let it get this bad before. He’s never needed to.

The cold metal rail of the rehab bed jabs into Klaus’s arm as he leans over to vomit into his bowl again. He gives Steve a thumbs up from across the room.

Steve is, like, fifty and addicted to crack, Klaus thinks, and he doesn’t deserve this.

“You are one sick dude.”

“Thank you,” Klaus wipes a bit of drool and vomit from his chin and flashes him a weak smile.

“Every time you throw up, it makes me want to throw up,” Steve’s legs are dangling over the edge of his bed. He’s leaning against the wall, with his head back and eyes closed. Can’t sleep, Klaus thinks, just like me. 

“Just take the fucking methadone, dude.”

Klaus giggles. “My eight days are up tomorrow.”

“Just take --” Steve raises his voice and shakes his head, “You know what? You’re not the first fucking junkie I’ve seen die in an eight day clinic and you won’t be the last.”

“You come here often?” 

“Come on! You’re not afraid of dying?” Steve looks about ready to throw down. His withdrawals are making him irritable, Klaus thinks, but then, he just got here. The first two days Klaus was testy too. Then, the pain set in.

He flops on his stomach and holds his chin in his hands. They’re so sweaty and weak that he can barely support the weight of his own head. His hair is falling out. I probably look half dead already, he thinks. It’s been ages since he looked in a mirror. The best this place offers is dull metal slabs in the bathroom.

“Sometimes I shoot up in graveyards,” Klaus says, bobbing his feet behind him like a girl at a sleepover in the movies, “To make it easier for them, you know, when I OD.”

Steve shakes his head. “You’ve got issues, man. Have some goddamn respect for the Dead.”

That one gives Klaus the energy he needs for a full-on manic laugh. Of course, by now, the room is packed full of Them. They’re pacing, howling, screaming at him in different languages. Klaus has even seen Ben a couple times since he got here, a small comfort, but he’s been giving him the silent treatment. 

Klaus wonders what the point of haunting someone is if you don’t even have it in you to talk to them. 

He’s just mad that I’m wasting this _wonderful_ life I’ve been given, Klaus thinks, when he can’t get his back.

Ben was different, though. Everyone liked Ben.

The eighth day is supposed to be for change. That was the cheesy gimmick of these eight day clinics, right, because God planned everything out in seven? 

“Goodbye bitches!” Klaus shouts, as he leaves, more to the Dead than the rehab itself, although he wouldn’t be above that interpretation. 

God knows he needs change, or preferably more than change. Twenty dollars would be ideal. That’s Plan C, though. For now, he’s going to try and sweet-talk Teko into a loan. 

It’s a good day to be alive, Klaus thinks. His veins twinge as he gets on the bus, singing out for the only thing they’re good for. Because pumping blood? Klaus thinks, that’s overrated.

V.

Klaus takes a deep breath in. That’s strange, he thinks, because just a minute ago he was --

He opens his eyes to violent spin of the city street zooming by outside the window, the bright white glare of the lights overhead, the shrill whine, and the beep and the smell of fucking saline again. The paramedic, at least, looks happy with herself.

“Whoa,” Klaus’s lip twitches upwards in delight. All the colors and noises and feelings are so good in that moment, the afterglow of one incredible high.

“Holy shit,” he says, “Am I dead? Is Heaven an ambulance?”

The paramedics share a chuckle, and Klaus doesn’t even care if it’s at his expense. The one leaning over him with a defibrillator looks exhausted. Her brown hair is tied up in a loose ponytail and Klaus resists the cat-like urge to paw at it. He can feel the rush of the ground passing beneath them and it feels exhilarating.

“Don’t tell me this is hell,” He says, “You’re too pretty to be a demon.” 

The paramedic laughs. 

“You’re alive, Klaus,” she says, “You just OD’d again.”

“How do you know my…” Klaus starts, reality beginning to grip its sharp fingers into the pleasant cushy underbelly of his mind.

“This is the third time in the last two months,” she says, “And you always ask if you’re in Heaven, or if I’m an angel. No --” she shakes her head “ -- my name is Danielle. I’m a paramedic. That’s it, just keep breathing.”

Klaus shakes his head back and forth, and coughs. He feels like he’s being possessed, more so than usual, and he is just one particularly stubborn ghost that won't go away. It’s about outrunning the Dead every bit as it was in the beginning, but now it’s also about outrunning the filth. It’s about outrunning his family. It’s about outrunning every blowjob he’s ever given for drug money. It’s about outrunning the drugs themselves.

Klaus should have collapsed long ago. Nobody is meant to keep running and running forever. He wants to voice that to the paramedics somehow, but he can’t stop wheezing. They slip the oxygen mask over his nose and mouth and Klaus breathes again. Not because he wants to, but because it’s habit. It’s always habit. He’s had a lot of practice using these lungs, he’s just never been good at it.

When he blinks his eyes open, Klaus realizes that at some point between his overdose and now, he’s been moved to a hospital bed. He’s also keenly aware that his high has worn off and he’s already got that tingling for more. The periods he can tolerate sobriety have been shrinking smaller and smaller.

It’s funny, he thinks, that every hospital room looks the same. 

It used to be so fun, he thinks, when did it stop being fun?

Klaus can feel himself being watched, a feeling that’s almost second nature to him. He props himself up towards the visitor’s chair, expecting a total stranger to be sitting there, demanding that he find a way to trade places, a deal Klaus would gladly accept. Instead, it’s only Ben, and he’s looking at Klaus with tears in his eyes.

“I want you to get better,” he says, “ _Please.”_

Klaus looks away. “Yeah. I get it.”

“Can I ask you something?”

Klaus nods.

“Are you trying to kill yourself?”

Klaus thinks about it. If he wanted to kill himself, he thinks, he could jump out of this window. Or borrow Teko’s gun. Or jump in front of a moving car. _Ororor._

“I’m toying with it,” he says instead, “It’s kind of like a race, you know, but I’ve stopped trying to beat it. I like getting high. If I die this way, it’s just another shitty side effect.”

“And no one has to feel bad?”

“Yeah,” the ghost of a smile plays across his lips, “You get it.”

  
  


& VI.

The first few days feel like a dream, but his body sinks back into addiction like it never left. Diego drives Klaus to the methadone clinic. He uses fingerless gloves to hide the marks on his hands. It isn’t shame or pride or anything like that, just stubbornness and unwillingness to look back.

He locks himself inside his room and stares at the ceiling until he sees colors that aren’t there. His body is tired. He’s angry. Nobody seems to notice, because it’s Klaus, and also because of all that business with the end of the world. 

Klaus’s world ended in Vietnam. All he cares about is bringing it back.

Come on, Dave, he thinks to himself, come through for me. 

He pours himself a glass of orange juice. He meditates. 

“You seem...different,” says Luther, over breakfast.

“He’s trying to get sober, you big idiot,” says Diego.

Klaus goes back into his room. 

He’s never tried to talk to the Dead before, not actually, and he has no real handle on how his powers actually work. He tries flipping his “Hello” hand up and his “Goodbye” hand down and sitting cross-legged on his mattress like a modern day Baphomet. All he gets is the snickering of Five passing him in the hallway.

Klaus is getting used to the feeling of a mattress again, his cot and bedroll in the war more comfortable than this dark lonely mansion. Dave had been his home. Klaus thinks with vitriol, about the blood and the bodies of his brothers and _Dave._ He wishes he could have taken Dave’s place. He wishes he wasn’t so hard to kill.

Most nights, the dreams wake him up quicker than the ever-present Dead and their droning. He’s learned to tune it out, mostly, to scan the cacophony for his lover’s laughter. More times than not he shakes himself awake, clinging to the pillow like a body.

“Klaus _is_ acting really weird,” he overhears Diego say, the next morning, after a particularly violent dream. 

“Klaus has always been weird,” Five covers him.

Nobody knows what to say. There hasn’t been a spot for Klaus’s sobriety at this family’s table -- fucked up as it may be -- for years, not since he crashed Diego’s car. They all dance awkwardly around it, a tension everyone can sense but doesn’t want to talk about. That’s the difference, Klaus thinks, between them and Dave. Dave knew his entirety and loved him anyway. Even when he had every right to think Klaus was out of his mind, he had believed it.

“Someday,” Klaus had said, “You’ll meet them and you’ll see why --” He had gestured towards himself. _You’ll see why I’m like this,_ he meant, but Dave had just held him close.

“We’ll be old men before that happens,” Dave had replied, and kissed him in the low light of their shower room at dawn, just two bodies inexplicably -- perfectly -- come together.

The war had taken that from them, and Klaus intended to get it back.

They’ve only got a few more nights on this planet, Five says, and yet Klaus is lying on his mattress staring at the ceiling. He swirls the water on his bedside table around and around, trying to read the film of dust that settled there like tea leaves. 

“Klaus?”

A voice from the doorway startles him and Klaus looks up, a manic glow in his eye.

“Dave?”

“Klaus, it’s just me.”

Klaus feels his entire stomach drop as Ben walks into the room and sits down next to him.

“Oh,” he sighs, “Hi.”

“He’s looking for you, though, Dave,” Ben says with a smile, “He must have been really special.”

Klaus’s stomach somersaults again. “You’ve seen Dave? You’ve talked to him?”

“Not exactly. It’s hard to explain, but I feel him. On the other side, we all become connected and aware of one another’s intentions in a way that transcends time, language, the senses. Trippy stuff.”

“No,” Klaus says, “I get it.”

He feels guilty, and he can’t put a nail on it until Ben speaks again.

“Thanks for doing this.”

Klaus knows “this” means the sobriety -- the sobriety he could have never committed to for Ben, or anyone else in his family, no matter how much he hurt them. Klaus shakes his head.

“No, Ben, I’m -- I’m really sorry,” Klaus says, “I’m sorry you had to watch it. I’m sorry I ignored you all the time. I’m sorry I took it all for granted. I’m just --”

It’s going to be the first apology of many, he thinks to himself, end of the world or not. He’s going to get really good at them.

“I know,” Ben looks him in the eyes, and claps a hand against his back. 

Claps.

Like physical, corporeal --

Klaus sees in surrealism, and realizes, with a rush, that he is not going to let the world end. Not if he’s on it, not if it’s planning to take him with.

I’m hard to kill, Klaus thinks, and for the first time in his life, he is grateful.

  
  


_fin_


End file.
